I WAS relieved to read earlier this year that Bahrain had launched a biometric payment system, ‘A first for Bahrain’, (GDN, March 13).
Sadad has already signed up and last week Benefit partnered with Ferego, which also uses biometric technology.
Hopefully soon we can do away with passwords, the headache of the digital age.
There’s your email passwords, which you normally remember until you suddenly don’t. There’s the one for your bank, which you forget literally every time you have to use it.
There’s your Facebook password and your Instagram password, only which is which? There’s your Netflix password, which you changed to an incredibly rude word so as to no longer forget it, which was awkward when your aunt borrowed it to watch The Crown.
There’s an Amazon password, and an Apple password, and the password you use to get into your computer, and your WiFi password. Then there are all the passwords for the websites you use to buy things. Most of them require that your password has a capital letter, a number and a special character, and must not be the same as any of your last eight passwords. This has always felt like overkill. For a while, these were all the same password. Then you read that this was unwise, so you began to use a password manager. This worked well, until you forgot the password.
However, 90 per cent of employees of the technology giant Microsoft already do without. Various alternatives exist, including biometric recognition and linked apps on your smartphone, but the most promising may be authentication via your fingerprints.
On the plus side, nobody can steal your finger, at least without you noticing. On the downside, you could have used any of 10 fingers, and are almost certain to have forgotten which one.
&uuid=(email))